A thought on Internet advertising

I don’t know if this goes anywhere, but I’ll toss it out.

I was thinking about Internet advertising — banner ads, text ads (like those on this site), flash animations, pop-ups — and I realize that I tune them out. They usually aren’t annoying; they’re simply part of the landscape that I ignore or scroll past.

Like a lot of people, I have a popup blocker; in my case it comes with Firefox, but you can certainly get the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer. All to avoid ads.

What’s interesting to me is that I wouldn’t think of clicking on a Web site’s ads except to do it as a show of support for the site. (Many of them make their money based on click-throughs.) And I realized, in part, why that is.

You need a lot of money to advertise on a major television network or in a larger newspaper. That means, for the most part, the products are self-selecting; they’re made by large companies and are probably pretty decent.

That’s because there is a limited number of major networks, and even smaller ones, and there’s a limited number of newspapers. Space there is at a premium.

Not so the Net. So many sites, so many ads at so many prices. Futher, when television first got started, the barrier to entry was even higher. With the Net, many of the first advertisers were junk — and many are still here today, making the flashing ads promising “You’re a winner!”

So with television, we grew up respecting, in a sense, the advertisers we saw on the tube. That’s why so many silly products tout “As Seen on TV!!!” There’s still a certain cachet, a distinction, to being seen there. With the Net it was the opposite. While there are plenty of excellent companies with excellent ads, my gut still tells me that clicking on a banner will only lead to junk.

That isn’t to say this will continue. Others came later to the Net than I did, and thus don’t have the same instinctive reaction of “No way will I click on that!” But the virtually unlimited size of the Web will always, I think, mean a lower barrier to entry and thus a lower average product advertised there.